She shrugged and looked up, wiping her eyes with a sleeve of her robe. “I don’t know. I mean, I thought we told each other everything, but . . .”
But obviously Hattie hadn’t trusted her best friend enough to tell her about L.G.
“A couple weeks ago,” she huffed, hiccuping, “Hattie’s truck broke down on some nowhere road south of Zumbrota. I dropped everything to go pick her up—and I’d just flown home from the choir trip the day before—but she wouldn’t even tell me where she’d been or why she had a suitcase with her. She made me drive her to the Apache Mall in Rochester and said she had something to take care of. She wouldn’t tell me what and she wouldn’t let me come with her. I was pissed. I spent an hour at the Gap waiting for her to text me. When she finally came back, the suitcase was gone and she looked, I don’t know, like sweaty but happy.”
“What did she do with the suitcase?”
“I don’t know. When I asked, all she would say was It’s waiting.”
“What did it look like?”
“Small, carry-on size. Black with wheels.”
“And you don’t know where she was earlier that day or where she went while you waited at the mall?”
“No, her cheeks were all red and she was out of breath when she came back, but she totally changed the topic whenever I asked. She bought a sundress for herself and randomly bought me a shirt, like a total afterthought, then spoke like two words to me on the ride home. She didn’t even ask about my trip.”
The anger and grief were all churned up together in her voice and she kept wiping at her eyes.
“After that day, she seemed all right except like, not there anymore. Even though we still talked and hung out, she acted weird.”
“How’s that?”
“I don’t know. Like on Friday after the play I told her she’d been great, and she just laughed and said she was done acting. And I was like, Oh, you’re retiring at eighteen? Can you be more dramatic? But then she was. She was done, she was done.”
Portia broke into full sobs. Both her parents stood at the door, her mother clutching a dish towel, her father’s head bent.
“All right.” I pointed to the ceiling and waited until she registered the gesture. “You think of anything else and you know where to go, right?”
She nodded and walked out of the room, melting behind the wall of her parents’ bodies. I nodded at both of them and let myself out. Maybe it was unrelated, but I wanted to know what Hattie did with that suitcase and why she was carrying it around in the first place. I called Jake on my way into Rochester and filled him in. He was busy requesting a warrant on a few websites that he thought Hattie’d visited a lot, but said he’d check with the Rochester police for reports of abandoned luggage.
I chewed on the interview for the rest of the drive. Hattie hadn’t told her best friend about L.G. or where she’d been that day her truck broke down, and wouldn’t let Portia see what she did with that suitcase. Usually when someone stashed a suitcase they were getting ready to run away, but what did she need to run away from? The list of Hattie’s secrets was growing. What would Bud do if I had to tell him any of this? If I had to take his girl away all over again?
Part of me couldn’t help hoping the DNA would come back as Tommy’s. It was a simple story, one I’d heard dozens of times over the years with different variations, yet always the same key parts. A couple has a fight, things get out of hand, and he kills her. It wasn’t a crime I understood, but it’d become awfully familiar. The rest of this—a curse, a secret lover, a possible runaway attempt—came from someplace else entirely. Her body flashed into my head again, stabbed and bloody on top, legs bloated and floating in the water below, with me kneeling next to her, trying to fit her disjointed pieces together.
I turned off the highway into downtown Rochester, looking for another piece.
“Of course, she was an amateur. That was abundantly clear from the first day of rehearsals.”
Gerald Jones was built like a beanpole and dressed all in black. Not like Johnny Cash black, more like Fred Astaire pretending to be a cat burglar. We were in the front office of the Rochester Civic Theater, and he’d spent the last ten minutes wiping his dry eyes and showing me “stills” from the Jane Eyre play he’d directed Hattie in last fall. They looked like run-of-the-mill pictures to me.
“She didn’t even know stage directions at first. I had to ride her a bit, but by the second week she’d gotten up to speed and apart from the technical side of the business, she was a director’s dream.”
“Why’s that?”
“She was the perfect actor. Unformed clay. All I had to say was ‘more vulnerable’ or ‘urgency’ and she’d make the adjustment. It flowed through everything she did—her gestures, face, posture, tone, volume. I’d cast her because she had a good read and her appearance was exactly what I was after. See?”